If Michel Platini's ambition, despite his repeated denials, really is to cut the Premier League down to size through subjecting foreign players to a quota system and throwing clubs who get themselves into massive debt out of major competitions, then the president of European football's governing body can probably save himself a great deal of time and trouble. On the evidence of last weekend, the balance of power is already shifting, driven by forces over which he has no control.

Even the order in which Europe's major leagues opened for business seemed to make a statement. La Liga's first matches took place on Saturday, a week after Serie A, two weeks after the Premier League and three weeks after the German and French first divisions. There was little doubt who were the support acts and who was topping the bill.

The opening match at the Bernabéu, in which the new crop of superstars representing Real Madrid beat Deportivo la Coruña 3-2, attracted interest throughout the continent. In a way it was reassuring as well as entertaining to see the remodelled Real conforming to the old stereotype: champagne attacking, soda-pop defending.

Kaká, Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema and Raúl, playing their first competitive match together, whirled and darted in a forward-line symphony that produced plenty of discords but will surely become better synchronised as the season goes on. Behind them, Xabi Alonso and Lassana Diarra looked capable of a partnership as effective as the one Alonso enjoyed at Liverpool with Javier Mascherano. And behind those two, well ... one of the attractions of even Real Madrid's best sides is that their defenders always invite the opposition to feel that they are in with a chance. Eintracht Frankfurt, it will be remembered, scored first before ending up on the wrong side of a 7-3 scoreline in the 1960 European Cup final.

There is much to applaud in Platini's desire to persuade clubs to nurture home-grown talent and to prevent them taking out massive loans in order to pay inflated transfer fees. A better world would undoubtedly be one in which Lyon, Bayern Munich, Atlético Madrid, Fiorentina and Fenerbahce felt they had a genuine chance of winning the continent's top competition. But I can't help thinking that extravagant assemblies of talent, however much they distort competition and offend natural decency, are what has made the highest level of European football so compelling over the past 60 years, whether we are talking about the Madrid of Di Stefano and Puskas, the Milan of Gullit, Van Basten and Rijkaard or the Barcelona of Messi, Henry and Eto'o.

New players are a symbol of status and ambition at any level of football, and the failure of England's top four clubs to land a single one of the summer's top transfer targets has not gone unnoticed. Thanks to the pound's loss of value against the euro and the top tax rate of 50%, which are making it virtually impossible for them to outbid their Spanish and Italian rivals, they have started the season with line-ups strikingly similar to those on view last year, only the pledge of steady organic growth in Arsenal's case and the galvanising effect of a new manager on Chelsea to indicate the possibility of significant progress. Manchester United are struggling to adjust to the loss of Ronaldo and Carlos Tevez, while the departure of Xabi Alonso was blamed for Liverpool's rocky start. Already we are hearing fewer players claiming that it was always their dream to play in the Premier League.

Perhaps even more ominously for English clubs with designs on the Champions League, there was another new aggregation on show on Saturday. Internazionale's 4-0 victory in the Milan derby suggested that the addition of Lucio, Wesley Sneijder and Samuel Eto'o might just have given José Mourinho the means to repeat his triumph with Porto five years ago – something he never did at Chelsea. Now that really would be hard for the Premier League to stomach.

Syer's team-building theories a lasting legacy

John Syer, a pioneer of sports psychology, died this month, aged 72. One of the first people to recognise the value of his work was Keith Burkinshaw, the Tottenham Hotspur manager who signed Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa in 1978. You might not necessarily have expected Burkinshaw, a slightly dour Yorkshireman, to be the type to embrace the sort of theories eventually set down in the book Sporting Body, Sporting Mind, written by Syer and his colleague Christopher Connolly, but they were an important factor in the performance of the Spurs side that won the FA Cup in 1981 and 1982.

Syer's influence spread beyond football. He was behind the scenes when Chris Boardman won an Olympic gold medal in the Barcelona velodrome in 1992, and at the 1996 and 2000 Games he helped the Dutch to win gold in field hockey, his own first love. His theories on team building found applications in industry and politics. In a discipline that has its share of charlatans, he was a quiet, thoughtful man of profound wisdom, who made converts in even the most sceptical dressing room.

Burnley's 'beast' recalls a time when pigs could fly

Brian "The Beast" Jensen, Burnley's larger-than-life goalkeeper, may have been on the wrong end of a 3-0 scoreline at Stamford Bridge on Saturday, but his status as a Premier League folk hero is already secure.

His approach to shot-stopping reminds me of Tommy Lawrence, the Scottish goalkeeper in Bill Shankly's great Liverpool team, who was known to the Kop as the Flying Pig and who specialised in frustrating opposing strikers by making saves with his feet while diving in the opposite direction.

RFU's task force must know name of the game

The Image of the Game Task Force is the name given by English rugby union's governing body to the 13-man panel charged with sorting out the mess that has been left by the Harlequins and Bath scandals. Like the composition of the group, which consists entirely of such high-level rugby administrators and insiders as Rob Andrew and Lawrence Dallaglio, the title betrays a misconception of the job that needs to be carried out. It's not the image of the game that is the problem. It's the reality.